I’m going through my old photos, reprocessing them through Aperture 2 and adding metadata (or giving it a good scrub). Some photos were done before I got Aperture (processed in iPhoto, perish the thought), some I just want to look at again with my current skill level, and some I just never got round to processing properly anyway.

First up for review today was the set of photos I took when Alfie (RIP) played the Camden Barfly in 2005 (I had a mini-midlife crisis when when I saw how old the photos were).

It’s been an interesting process. I’ve learnt that my post-processing workflow is now so well-honed that I can get from 291 images to 2 presentable ones in 10 minutes, quite easily.

My photography has definitely progressed rapidly since those days when I shot the photo above with my first SLR, a Canon 350D. I’m still quite proud of the twophotos that made the cut this time round, though.

“The last time I checked, the amount of e-mail you get is not a function of how often you check e-mail.”

This is, quite frankly, bollocks.

Since I’ve got into the habit of only checking email twice a day, the number of emails coming into my inbox has decreased substantially. There are a multitude of reasons why this is the case, but here’s two I can think of off the top of my head:

Since I reply less frequently, I get replies to my replies less frequently, so I reply less frequently, and so on. It’s a virtuous circle.

If I’m being asked to do something urgently, people now actually pick up the phone or, gasp, speak to me, as they realise that sending an email with an ‘urgent’ flag on it does not mean that they have made a request. ((I’m actually thinking of setting up an auto-responder to emails with an ‘urgent’ flag or with ‘urgent’ in the subject line, along the lines of “If your request is truly urgent, i.e. needs doing within 24 hours, please contact me using a more appropriate communication method. If your request isn’t that urgent, please refrain from using the ‘urgent’ flag or the word ‘urgent’ in the subject line.”))

The 4-Hour Work Week is about a lot more than just inbox management, but if you’re looking for a way to get some control over the inbox beast, I highly recommend the chapters on ‘Elimination’.

When I first registered the domain logorrhoea.net, I had some lofty ideals around blogging about writing and words (the choice of domain name wasn’t completely random, after all) but lack of time and energy precluded any reasonable rate of output. ((For now I’ve hidden the few posts I did manage; they may resurface after some editing.))

In terms of subject matter for the blog, I’m not making any predictions or promises that will constrain me before I’ve even got going. ‘Eclectic’ will probably suffice for now.